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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25270258">ghost in the back of your closet</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/theskyisgay/pseuds/theskyisgay'>theskyisgay</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Magnus Archives (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Explicit Sexual Content, F/F, Hopeful Ending, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Melanie King POV, Miscommunication, POV Second Person, canon compliant up to s4, it's very very brief, mention of injury and blood, nothing graphic</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-07-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-07-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 07:55:41</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,988</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25270258</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/theskyisgay/pseuds/theskyisgay</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>There is no light but the glint of Georgie's teeth in the dim London evening, no hope but the movement of her fingers on your skin, gentle as forgiveness, as longing, as memory.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Georgie Barker/Melanie King</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>34</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>50</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>ghost in the back of your closet</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>hhhhhhh im love these ladies. </p><p>WARNING for like,,,non-graphic description of pain and blood and general unhappiness and angst. the implied homophobia is VVVV brief and in the past.</p><p>HUGE thank you to Dundee for encouragement and looking over the scene!! thank u so much i couldn't have written this were it not for you.</p><p>ALSo title from up the wolves by the mountain goats.</p><p>if theres any mistake let me know!!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Anger isn’t new to you. You’ve kept it alive within yourself for years, nurtured it and fed it. It won’t leave you with a bullet, and it doesn’t. It’s still there, a reminder under your skin, present and simmering, the rumblings of <em> something </em> unknown to you. </p><p>It’s Jon you scream at, after you realise what happened, Jon’s expression somber in a way you’ve seen many times and there’s guilt, that bites gently into your skin but the anger is greater, it always is and Jon’s there. They tell you it was because of the bullet, The Slaughter had gotten their hands on you, but you don’t think that’s it. It goes deeper than the bullet, it goes deeper than The Slaughter, it started when you were 13 and a child and you were told it was wrong to be in love with a woman, it started before that, you were born with it, you think, anger deep inside your bones, old as the green of the earth. </p><p>Basira asks if you want to go for a drink, it’s there in her eyes as well, some sort of recognition. She’s lost as well, you know, you see the way her eyes scream in surrender every day she comes to the Institute without Daisy. You’ve seen the way she used to look at Daisy, the way Daisy used to look at her, the collision of everything worth living for in one glance between them. She’s hollow now, you know that. So, you say <em> yes. </em></p><p>She doesn’t talk much and neither do you, but her presence is real at your side and the simmering under your skin is barely present, especially when she looks at you, eyes seeking but never demanding and something loosens within you, like a metal fist unclenching. </p><p>“To us,” Basira says, raises her glass, “may we live to see another day.”</p><p>You raise an eyebrow at her, “you want to live longer in this place?”</p><p>She doesn’t reply, but her eyes are sharp and you understand, she has hope, still, for Daisy, or perhaps for her own self. It doesn’t quite matter. </p><p>“To us,” you say, clink your glasses together. You’re not sure what she’s drinking, it’s not alcohol, neither is yours. But it’s something, it’s enough.</p><p>__</p><p>When you reach home, she’s there, laid out on the sofa, spread out, as if just for you, and the pin-pricks of desire rear their head inside your gut, hands trembling with the weight of it. </p><p>Georgie wakes up when she sees you, concern written in the crease of her forehead, “oh my god, Melanie, what happened?” </p><p>You shake your head, arms spreading just a little and she steps into them, as if she always belonged there, her breath warm on your neck, her hands firm as they wrap around your shoulders.</p><p>When she kisses you, it feels like destruction, and you hold on to her as hard as you can, feeling the ground beneath your feet waver, the curve of her breasts, her stomach, pressed tightly against yours and you feel every nerve ending light up quicker than thunder. </p><p>“Basira took me for drinks,” you murmur into her hair, “we drank a lot of lemonade, I think.” </p><p>“Is that all,” says Georgie, her voice seeping into your skin shamelessly and you wish to keep it there, guarding with battle-sharp nails and bloody-palms, all bite, all anger.</p><p>“No,” you mumble into her hair, she smells like every wet dream you’ve ever had. </p><p>“Melanie,” she begins, and you know what she wants to ask, what she wants to know, “what is it?”</p><p>You pull away from her, just slightly, every place your bodies aren’t connected seeming like an abomination. “I said it’s nothing.”</p><p>“Don’t lie to me. Not now, Melanie. I can take a lot, and I have to, with you, but don’t lie to me.” </p><p>You clench your teeth, just a little. In the despair of the unsilence inside your flat, the only thing that matters is the sound of Georgie’s breath and the weight of her hand on your chest. </p><p>“I don’t know what to tell you,” you say, and it’s the truth, not whole, perhaps, but you don’t know how to tell her that there was a bullet inside you that was making you <em> angry </em>but it’s gone now and you’re still angry but you’re also afraid, in a way you’ve never been because the anger isn’t leaving but she might. She might. </p><p>She pulls back completely, arms crossed over her chest, a defense you know how to break but you wonder if you still have the right to, anymore. </p><p>“I— I don’t want to talk about it right now, Georgie, I <em> can’t.” </em></p><p>“No, you never can, can you?” She says, but she’s closer now, arms hanging at her side and something loosens inside your chest. </p><p>She moves, softly, slowly, if you didn’t know better, you’d think she was afraid of you, <em> do you want her to be afraid of you, </em>you don’t quite know but that thought pokes and prods with needle-sharp movements at every vestige of your consciousness.</p><p> <em> She should be afraid of you, </em> you think, because there’s blood on your leg and molten anger swirling in your veins, taking over your blood, and the bullet is out, the bullet is <em> out,  </em></p><p>“Melanie,” she says, gentle, gentle, gentle, hands coming up to rest on your chest and your breath collapses inside your lungs, reminiscent of a building falling falling, falling, and you grasp her wrist with your hand, an anchor, one you don’t think you quite deserve, but what are you if not a taker? What is left of you if you do not take, take, <em> take </em>and if she doesn’t give as freely as she does.</p><p>She looks up at you, and London outside sways on its hinges with grief. You bring her wrist up to your lips, place your lips on her pulse and feel it <em> alive </em> underneath your mouth, the beginnings of a familiar <em> hunger </em>stirring low inside your gut and you graze your teeth over her pulse, soft as velvet and she gasps, just for you, low in her throat. </p><p>“Melanie,” she says again and it sounds like a prayer existing for decades inside her mouth and then she kisses you. Her hands grasping for purchase at your shoulders and you wrap your own arms around her waist, tight, tight, tight, bring her closer than you thought possible. She moans into your mouth and the knife-bright glint of desire shoots through your body, better than any fucking high in this universe or any other. </p><p>“Mealnie,” she gasps, pulls away from you, and it fucking aches something terrible from the bottom of your goddamn gut, every moment you’re not swallowing your name from her mouth, it’s the only time your name has ever felt holy.</p><p>“Take me to bed,” she whispers, her lips at the corner of your mouth, “please, Melanie, my darling, please.”</p><p>It doesn’t take long after that, to get her legs around your waist, fitting with her as if that’s all you were born to do and the bed is not welcoming, it never is, but she is grasping at your hair with something akin to desperation and it’s close enough to fear for you that the bullet hole in your leg and the blood on your hands, your fucking heart don’t really matter.</p><p>On the sheets, she looks a vision, her hair dark and curly spread around her like a halo, she’s everything you’ve always wanted and never thought you’d get. Her hands clasping onto your shirt as she pulls you down and spreads her legs. You settle between them as if you always belonged there and you think you might have. What other redemption will you ever get, if not the sound of your name in her mouth and her hands across your skin, gentle as a river, gentler than you deserve. </p><p>“Don’t stay in your head,” she says, your lips on the corner of her mouth, “not when I’m asking you to fuck me.” </p><p>Her words go straight to your gut, hurting like a punch, forgiveness given with the twist of her fingers in your own, the absence of fear in her dark eyes. On the best of days, her eyes look like the sky before thunder, on the worst of days, they look like the earth before a disaster. You think, right now, they’re somewhere in between.</p><p>Broken litanies humming in your head, as you press bruises onto her skin, blooming purple like the first flowers of spring. Her dark skin glistens with sweat as you taste it on your tongue and let it burn through your mouth like holy water, pressing kisses everywhere you can. </p><p>She’s gasping underneath you as you get your hands under her shirt, taking it off, off, off, the feel of bare skin underneath your palms going straight to your gut like a machete and you think, dizzy with the spell of it all, the spell of <em> her, </em>that she would just have to say one word, she would just have to look at you in that way she does sometimes for you to bleed out all over these sheets, evidence of her love staining your home for eternity. </p><p>And she does, look at you with unabashed tenderness and places her hands on your face and brings you up to her mouth. The kiss tastes like ashes in your mouth, remnants of a fire lit halfway and abandoned hurriedly. She gasps loud and unashamed as you get your mouth on her nipple, tongue swirling around it, teeth gentling over it, the shape of your mouth imprinting itself on her breast like something permanent and the sound Georgie lets out, as if ripped from her throat with sharpened nails travels up your spine like electricity, molten and hot and out of your fingertips as you drag them across the swell of her stomach, her thighs, removing her skirt and underwear, she’s wet, and she looks down at you, eyes brighter than anything alive has a right to be as you get one finger inside her.</p><p>You take your own shirt off with one hand, quick as lightning and lean onto her, a bit more, finger moving inside her in tune to the sounds she lets out, punched out from the bottom of her gut and the knowledge that you <em> did </em>this, knits itself to you like a second skin. </p><p>You get your mouth on her clit and another finger and she laughs, a little hollow, mostly breathy, and says, “you go all in, don’t you.”</p><p>It’s not a question and you don’t think she’s looking for an answer but you move your fingers <em> just </em> this side of vicious and remove your mouth from her clit to bite down on her thigh just slightly hard and figure that’s enough of an answer. She seems to expect it, with the way her hand lands in your hair, holding, holding, <em> keeping.  </em></p><p>Your mouth finds her clit again and your fingers don’t stop. The taste of her is something you know you’ll never forget, even if the world ends and takes you with it. </p><p>You grip her thighs around your shoulders, hope to leave proof that you’re <em> real </em> on <em> her </em> skin. </p><p>Her hand in your hair tightens, your name coming out of her mouth going straight between your legs and you drag your tongue down to where your fingers are and then back again. Everywhere you’re connected with her seeming to be the only reason you haven’t ripped your own hair apart. </p><p>“Melanie,” she gasps, “kiss me, I’m gonna come, kiss me,”</p><p>You do, gasp into her mouth as her hands pull, lightly, at your hair, swallow her sounds for your own and keep them tucked safe in your chest, fingers still moving inside her, your thumb on her clit.</p><p>She’s gasping into your mouth, the only sound that has ever mattered and when she comes apart underneath you, it’s with your name on her tongue, and it’s the only time it has ever been anything close to holy. </p><p>She shakes, just slightly under you and it takes the knife point of a second before you’re under her, laughter and blood in the viscera of your mouth as she leans back in your lap, hands on either side of your head, her lips on your neck, your hands on her hips, they’re soft underneath you, all of her is soft underneath you, in blatant contrast to the sharpness of her teeth on your skin, her nails digging into your shoulders, you wouldn’t have it any other way. You hope, distantly that she draws blood, just so you can <em> know </em>that some part of her is in your blood and always will be, even when you lose her. </p><p>It doesn’t take long for her to get the rest of your clothes off, and her fingers go straight between your legs and then it just doesn’t take long, not with her looking at you with the force of a thousand suns in her eyes, not with the way her hands feel like coming alive on your skin and when you come with her name on your lips, the only name that matters, she steals it from your mouth. </p><p>It <em> hurts</em>, then, when she kisses you.</p><p>Your hands fit over the ridges of her ribs like the beginning of the world and the way she gasped your name when you fucked her was nothing short of holy, nothing short of your own redemption so why shouldn’t it hurt when she kisses you with nothing but love between her lips.</p><p><em> Are you what I have to ruin to keep myself alive, </em>you think and do not say. </p><p>After, after, after, with the dim lights of London painting shadows of ghosts on her skin, she turns on her stomach and looks at the remnants of blood on your leg and says: </p><p>“I love you."</p><p>“Maybe you shouldn’t.” You reply, turn to face her, her hand reaches up your cheek, fingers tracing your cheekbones as if <em> you mean something, </em> as if the world isn’t on fire around you, as if you’re not broken to hell. </p><p>“I’m not afraid of you.” Georgie murmurs, low and sweet in the unforgiving moonlight filtering through the window.</p><p>“You should be,” you say, grasp her wrist and kiss a thousand apologies you’ll never say out loud into her palm and hope to a god you’ve never believed in that it’s enough.</p><p>“Even if I <em> could </em> be,” she starts, runs a thumb over your lower lip, “I wouldn’t be afraid of you.”</p><p>“That’s very unbecoming of you.” </p><p>She laughs and there’s no joy in it, and it feels right somehow, the upward twist of her lips without an ounce of mirth.</p><p>“Don’t think I didn’t notice. The blood, I mean.”</p><p>“You still fucked me.” </p><p>“I love you,” she says again and your spine lights up with it.</p><p>“Are you going to ask?”</p><p>“Will you tell me?”</p><p>You don’t look at her, for a minute, two, and there is a lump in your throat which tastes like relentless punishment and you turn away from her. </p><p>She doesn’t say anything. But there is a sound of rustling and the space next to you on the bed is empty, empty, empty. </p><p>“Georgie,” you say before you can stop yourself, “come back to bed.”</p><p>She doesn’t reply, but you watch as she slips into one of your t-shirts and for an unbelievably cruel second you think that she’s going to open the door and leave you and this flat and this life behind and she’s not going to look back. But she does, she looks back at you and says, “I love you,” and goes to sleep on the sofa outside. </p><p>You could say it back, you think, only on the edge of delirium, you could have said it back, you <em> do </em> love her, you think, in so much as you are capable of loving a breathing, living thing without ripping its limbs apart in the process. You love her, you think, if you <em> can </em> love someone, there is no one else you would love. </p><p>You don’t say it back, and she doesn’t sleep next to you that night. </p><p>__</p><p>“Why can’t you tell me,” she says, on the precipice of pleading, a week later, on the dining table with plates of cold food laid in front of you, “why don’t you tell me.”</p><p>“What will you do about it? March down to the Institute and kill Elias? Kill Jon? Is that what you think you’ll do?”</p><p>“If you could just <em> tell me </em> what’s happening there, what’s happening to <em> you, </em>then maybe I’ll be able to help.”</p><p>You laugh, only a little hysterical and if your hands shake, later, you will forgive yourself for it. You think of your father, the memory of his pain planted inside your head like weeds between the cracks of a building and expect the familiarity of anger for Elias to course through your veins like blood. It doesn’t. There’s only hollowness, empty as you wish the space inside your head could be, sometimes. </p><p>She’s waiting, you realise, her hands placed palm-up on the table and you wonder if she could tell a prophecy, <em> and they lived happily ever after, </em> or <em> they died alone and suffering, there is no freedom, no reprieve, no light, only the fire in your gut and one day it’ll burn all of you, </em>her eyes are bright in the evening light of London through the window, bright with sorrow, you suppose. It suits her, in a melancholy, 19th century fable sort of way. </p><p>“What’ll you do, Georgie?”</p><p>“I’ll help you quit,” she says, cold iron in her voice, and had you had anything worth saving left inside of you, you might have told her. </p><p>__</p><p>When you met her for the first time, she was soft as velvet, kind at the worst of times. When you kissed her for the first time, you realised that her hands weren’t soft, Georgie is, above everything, fierce as iron underneath it all, callouses on her fingers from holding on too tight, too hard, and you loved her then, with every ounce of force inside you, anger and love, all jumped up when you kissed her and you love her now, with the same power, sometimes you think, the anger is just a bit more.</p><p>__</p><p>Her hands across your ribs, fingers lighter than air, “Melanie, I can talk to Elias, if you <em> tell </em>me, I can talk to Jon, was it him? Did he do something? Was it to do with your leg?”</p><p>“Georgie, stop. Just stop. There’s nothing you can do. I’m dealing with it.”</p><p>“No, you aren’t. You mope around the house when you <em> do </em> come home, you don’t speak to me, you had blood on you, Melanie. You had blood on you. Is this because of Jon?”</p><p>“Not everything is because of Jon.” You say, harsher, than perhaps you intended to, but Georgie is nothing if not stubborn, she holds it in the way she places her hands, she holds it in the near-black of her eyes, holds it like an armour, a shield right along with her fearlessness, this though, her stubbornness, you know it’s something she’s always had.</p><p>“Then what <em> is </em>it because of? Because you come home every day and you look like you’re dying and you’re not letting me do anything and you’re not doing anything either. What the fuck am I supposed to believe, Melanie?”</p><p>“Leave then, if it’s so fucking hard for you, leave.” </p><p>Georgie laughs, the sound harsh as if grating her throat on the way out and it pierces through your skin like something ugly.</p><p>“Is that what this is building up to? Is this your plan? To goad me into leaving you? To scream at me enough times so that I leave you? It’s not going to work, Melanie, not on me. <em> I’m </em>not afraid of you.”</p><p>You breathe in, her hands are clasped on the table, mouth set in a line, she looks frantic, in a way you haven’t seen often, but it sticks to your skin like something stale and makes you want to tear everything apart that made her look like that, knowing you’re the cause of it. </p><p>Distantly, distantly, you wonder what would become of you if you tell her, if she stops working herself up everyday with fear for you, you wonder if the hollowness will return. </p><p>You know, in the heart of you, in whatever’s left of it, that you might be ruining her, but you haven’t felt <em> alive </em> since the day you joined that fucking place and the only time your nerves light up with something resembling fire is when she wrings her hands in worry for you, when her eyes are beseeching and her words sharper than any blade. </p><p>“You’re a fucking fool then,” you say, voice hoarse, laughter ripping itself out from your throat, “what the fuck do you want me to do, Georgie? I <em> can’t </em> tell you. I need you to be safe, I need you to be okay.”</p><p>“Do you love me?”</p><p>“What are you saying? Georgie, of course I do.”</p><p>“Then I need you to fucking understand that I would die for you, I would kill for you and I love you more than I thought I had in me, and I’m not fucking okay if you aren’t.” </p><p>The bloodless unsilence settles around you and you watch her, she’s breathing, fast, hands clenched together on the table, you wonder what you’d break if you reach out to touch her. </p><p>You think, <em> I’m so afraid I’ll break you and so afraid I won’t, I don’t know how to love you and yet it’s the only thing I know, </em>you say, “I don’t know how to do this, any of this.”</p><p>Her hand when, it touches yours, shouldn’t <em> burn </em> like it does, but your spine lights up, electric and overflowing and you let yourself breathe easier, let yourself be coaxed by the gentleness of her fingers in your hair, ever forgiving. </p><p>“We’ll find a way,” she murmurs, lips on your hair, “we always do.”</p><p>__</p><p>It doesn’t get easier, but she’s brighter than anything alive should have the right to be, and she’s relentless as memory. When she finds a therapist, you go. </p><p>The day you tell Jon you won’t work so much as just <em> be </em>in the Institute, you come home with something akin to relief in your bones and her arms are a sanctuary. You don’t tell her about Elias, about the bullet, but her breath in your skin is redemption and you have always been grateful for small mercies. </p><p>__</p><p>Turns out, gouging out your own eyes isn’t that difficult when you think of her smile, the one with teeth, glinting in the moonlight, turns out, when the end of the world follows on your heels, there isn’t much that matters. </p><p>__</p><p><br/>
She’s there in the hospital, after you leave the institute in the ambulance, her hand in yours and her name inside your mouth tasting of holy fire. “Georgie,” you whisper and feel her fingers over your face. “I’m sorry. Georgie, I’m so sorry.”</p><p>“Shh,” she says, “I’m here, you’re safe, the world hasn’t ended.” You feel her lips on your forehead and they burn: a cleansing, “this is just the beginning for us.”</p><p>This is just the beginning. </p><p>There is a secret you’ve known in the bottom of your undead heart since the day you met her: when the world burns around you, the only way to not let yourself turn to ash is to hold on to her hand, when there is no light, all you have to do is listen to the sound of her heart-beat and trust your feet to move forward, forward, forward. </p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>if i missed tagging something, let me know. </p><p>comment n kudos are my lifeblood. thank you so much for reading!!!!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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